Bloody Zombies

I came into Bloody Zombies expecting another throwaway zombie skin on a tired side-scrolling formula, and I was mostly right, but not entirely. The flatscreen game, stripped of its VR component, sits comfortably in the Double Dragon / Streets of Rage lineage: pick one of four cockney survivors (Teller, Mick, Rei, or Eddie), scroll left-to-right through ruined London landmarks, punch and combo your way through waves of increasingly mutated undead. It is exactly that. No more, and if you play solo, also noticeably less. The combat system has more depth than the first few levels suggest. Free-Form Combat lets you chain basic strikes into extended juggle combos, and there is a special-move layer on top tied to color-coded skill pickups you find across the eleven levels. The problem is that the special move inputs are built like a fighting-game command list, not a brawler shortcut. Holding the bumper and cycling between specials mid-scrum works fine in theory, but the hit detection is inconsistent enough that landing those inputs during a hectic wave feels more like luck than execution. Enemy sponge-factor is real too: even the basic zombie types absorb multi-hit combos for longer than feels satisfying, and some sections drag because the wave clears too slowly relative to the pacing you want from this genre. Reviewers at launch flagged the combat as sluggish, and that criticism still holds in 2025. The breakable weapon pickups (swords, hammers) add a brief damage spike that the combat badly needs, but they disappear too fast to rely on. Where the game earns its keep is the co-op setup, and specifically what the VR layer does for team play. A headset player gets a full diorama view of each stage, able to look left, right, and lean in to spot hidden paths, health packs, and 1UPs that flatscreen players simply cannot see. That asymmetric information loop turns a generic brawler into something with actual communication value between players. Up to four people can play together with any mix of VR and flatscreen, online or local. Online play is the weak point in 2025: the player pool is thin, and finding a random lobby is difficult enough that you should treat this as a game you bring friends to, not one you expect to matchmake into. With three friends in a call it is genuinely fun, and the score competition layered on top of the co-op keeps sessions from getting stale inside a single playthrough. Solo is a hard sell. The difficulty spikes when numbers drop, the combo juggling loses its rhythm without another player feeding into the chain, and the VR advantage disappears if nobody has a headset. The sketchbook art direction holds up, the cockney character banter has some charm early on before the catchphrases loop, and the multi-level London settings (London Bridge, back alleys, kids playgrounds mid-apocalypse) stay varied enough to carry you through. But the flatscreen solo experience sits at a solid mid-tier with a ceiling that the online population no longer helps you reach.

Fred · Scout Team

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